The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Book 15 in #15in2015
In an era when so much fantasy–especially the really popular sellers–read like novelizations of movies that have never been made, this book (I read it in a single volume edition) was wonderful.
This isn’t my first time through. I read Lord of the Rings in high school and then again in the nineties when a pre-production interview with Peter Jackson got me all excited for the stories again. This time, though, for my third read, I promised myself that I wouldn’t skim.
Because, frankly, LOTR is pretty skimmable. Especially at the start, where Tolkien was obviously feeling his way through the story, trying to get a handle on what was happening.
But by the end of the story, the cumulative weight of what had gone before has a powerful effect. I’m not even sure when the change happened, but somewhere in The Two Towers I was hooked.
I’m not going to talk about these books too much, since so many others have done it before and better. However, I was really touched by the scenes in The Scouring of The Shire, in which Frodo, who’s been touched so deeply by evil, pleads with the others not to do violence of any kind.
Anyway, flawed, but its flaws are part of what makes it so wonderful.